Patrick Ettinger . Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 . Austin : University of Texas Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 244. $60.00.

Abstract

The reports coming in from U.S. immigration officials stationed on the U.S.‐Mexico border were alarming. Transnational smuggling networks were surreptitiously transporting thousands of migrants across the border into the United States. Individuals who would have been excluded at regular ports of entry were easily entering the country without inspection through the country's “back door.” Every attempt immigration officials made to stem the tide was met with resistance, migrant ingenuity, and new technology. There seemed little that the U.S. government could do to remedy this broken immigration system. Contemporary readers might quickly place this characterization of the U.S.‐Mexico border in the late twentieth or early twenty‐first centuries. In fact, as Patrick Ettinger's book illustrates, these reports and the struggles of U.S. immigration officials to enforce a seemingly unenforceable border are a century old. Undocumented immigration into the United States became prevalent beginning in the late nineteenth century and involved a surprisingly diverse group of immigrants: Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Syrians, and Mexicans. In his attempts to recover this largely unknown history, Ettinger offers a complex thesis. On the one hand, border control at both the U.S.‐Mexican and U.S.‐Canadian borders underwent an immense amount of change. Beginning in the 1880s, the two borders were mostly unguarded, existing only as “imaginary lines” that were easily traversed. By the 1930s, a highly regulated and professionalized system of border control was in place with dedicated immigrant inspection stations, border patrols, and policies. However, undocumented entry did not disappear. Border‐crossing patterns changed, but as we know from contemporary headlines and immigration debates, illicit entry of immigrants into the United States continues. Ettinger's goal, then, is to “understand and explain how a border to which so many resources had been devoted could undergo such little fundamental change” (p. 3).